In collaboration with Vergennes boat builder Douglas Brooks, Special Collections is offering a new short-term exhibit The Two Pointers of Dead Creek : A Tradition of Trapping and Boat Building in Addison County. Assistant Curator Danielle Rougeau is working with Douglas Brooks on mounting the exhibit on the Lower Level of the Davis Family Library. The exhibit officially opens on Wednesday, September 1, 2010, and will be on view through Friday, October 1.

During the 2009-2010 academic year, Brooks and three Middlebury College students, Renee Igo ’11, Christian Woodard ’11 and Ben Meader ’10.5, interviewed trappers and their descendants in an effort to document the culture of muskrat trapping in Addison County, with an emphasis on the “two pointers”, the double-ended boats that trappers built.

After a training program with the Vermont Folklife Center, the researchers began recording interviews and examining historic boats. Over twenty historic trapping boats were identified in the region. Eventually several boats were carefully measured and one was chosen for replication. The students displayed an historic boat at the 2010 Middlebury College Student Research Symposium.

In the 2010 spring semester, Igo, Woodard, and Meader, guided by Brooks, built this trapping boat in studio space at Middlebury’s Old Stone Mill. The boat was launched on Commencement day, May 27, 2010.

We have just introduced a new course schedule planning tool to help students discover courses and arrange selections of them that avoid timing conflicts.

When browsing the online catalog at go/catalog you can now log in and save courses that you find interesting. Look for “Save” links to the top-right of course descriptions. Courses can be saved either from the search view or from the detail views linked-to from department course listings.

This screen-cast gives an overview of the Schedule-Planner and how to use it:

Notable features:

Save courses at any time as you come across interesting ones.

Create one or more schedules for a term to see how different course selections might fit together.

Ensures that discussion and lab sections are considered.

Time-conflicts are highlighted.

Schedules can be emailed to an adviser or anyone else.

Schedules can be printed to aid in finding classrooms.

Please note that this tool is designed as a planning and advising aid — it does not register you for classes. Also, it does not have access to individual student records and hence does not check that prerequisites have been met.

The Schedule Planner is still in Beta for the next few weeks, please try it out and provide feedback so that we can address any problems before new students arrive on campus.

With the merger of Collection Management and portions of Academic Consulting Services, it became clear that the area needed a new name to reflect its expanded scope.

I’m therefore pleased to announce that the name for this area is now Research and Collection Services (RCS). While many portions of the website still reflect the old names — and it will take a while before we’ve eradicated all remnants of Collection Management/Academic Consulting Services from the website, email distribution lists, HR/Banner information, etc. — please consider the name to be effective immediately. We’ll try to get the changes made expeditiously.

We have made the Armstrong Science library an official pick up location for ILL and NExpress materials. If you select Armstrong delivery, your requested materials will be automatically sent to the Armstrong Science Library for pick up when they arrive at Middlebury.

This is now possible for both NExpress and interlibrary loan materials. However, selecting this option is done very differently in each system.

For NExpress the choice is made each time an item is ordered, through a drop-down menu. Select Armstrong Science library from the list of available pick up locations. go/NExpress

For ILLiad, the choice is made at registration. In order for a current ILLiad user to change their preferred delivery location in ILLiad, you will need to update your contact Information in the Tools menu in ILLiad. Click on “Edit My Contact Information” and select Armstrong Science Library as your “Delivery Site” to take advantage of this new service. You can return to regular pick up at the Davis Family Library at any time by returning to ILLiad and changing your selected delivery site back to Davis Family Library. go/ill

The dog days of summer may have passed (we hope) but the heat is on, with just over two weeks of school left and symposium projects galore. Cubicles in the library are filled to capacity, and the Wilson Media Lab is no exception. With a full fleet of tutors, we are working hard to meet the digital media needs of students, staff, and faculty.

Here’s just a taste of what we’re working on.

Faculty course websites for the fall semester

GIS mapping of trees on campus

3D environments for the psychology department

Digitization projects for archives, professors, and the library

In addition to our long-term projects, the lab is busy every day with walk-ins making projects for classes, presentations, or research.

In other lab news, we’ll soon be updating the software image on the Mac towers, which will include an operating system upgrade, among other things. With each passing year, we hope to keep the lab up-to-date on technological/educational developments and continue to support the Middlebury community’s forays into the latest in electronic possibilities.

We’ve also recently installed a new color printer, so please be aware that students seeking color printing can be directed to us whenever the need arises. We’re always happy to help them, and anyone else, with media-related questions.

Anna Berry, a former library staff member in Starr Library in the 1970’s, died of a stroke on Tuesday, June 1. She was part of a team that converted our book collection from Dewey classification to the LC call numbers currently in use.